How To Transfer Tacit Knowledge for Living Lab Practice Consideration on Tacit Knowledge Representations

Abstract

Despite strong attention and wide ranges of practice, living labs have hardly scaled up for a decade as expected. For living labs as one of the innovative methods for social challenges in cities with high complexity and uncertainty, one of the critical challenges is in knowledge transfer of its practice. Practical tacit knowledge for living lab is often embedded within process, organization and operation, and hardly externalized. The inexperienced practitioners face a lot of uncertainty in implementation of living lab without clues where to tackle. Aiming at promoting the living lab practice widely, this paper investigates tacit knowledge externalization with three different representations. The analysis and comparison of external representations indicate a strong compatibility pattern between representation styles and practitioners’ maturity level on the relevant field. In the living lab practice, how to convey tacti knowledge should be considered carefully, depending on practitioners’ maturity level.